7 July '12 Visit

The floor is dirty. My toes rub themselves together. We ask if we can clean his house, as always. Only this time, Mr Chiu brings out a long contraption of a cylinder.

“Other volunteers gave me a new mop, and I don’t know how to use it,” he says, his Mandarin slow.

This gets us in a tizzy; we hunker down, attack the un-formed mop.  It is clear why he has problems rigging it up - it's a new-fangled mop where the head spins itself dry. The Moving Parts and Locking Switch take us a while to assemble.


It looks a little like the one in the video below:

Mr Chiu takes a stool next to us. The way he’s seated, looking down at these white-teed volunteers helping him with his mop on a slow, warm, Saturday morning, I can’t catch the look on his face. I think it for the better.

Floor swept, mopped; window grilles wiped. He sings. Gets out his songbook. Our songbook. I hum along to tunes I know. He doesn’t sing very much.

“No music,” he explains.

I move to get the CDs and stereo I know is sitting at the corner of the bookshelf.

“It’s not working,” SX says helpfully. I haven’t been visiting in a while.

Mdm Chow Moi’s floor is clean(er). Never have we been allowed to clean her house, nor have we needed to. Today she is her same cheery self.

We like her. The petite lady’s big toothless smile helps. Her selective hearing too. Feigned or otherwise, it acts up at the most inopportune points in conversation, drawing laughs and sometimes resigned changes of topic. It is a lucky day if we can catch her with her hearing aid on; it isn’t her favourite of things.

It’s drizzling out. We cajole her into letting us shut the window nearest to her bed, neatly made.

An article she had kept, with familiar words.
Walking Round Her One-room Flat - Hobby since the '90s.
Photo credit Facebook.

Two volunteers have left for other matters by the time we arrive at Mdm Ho’s. Hers is our last stop for this visit. The place doesn’t smell as much of her potty today.

Taking turns with conversation and the chores are the remaining two of us.

Excited about her recent GST Voucher, she fishes it out, happy to receive more benefits because of her age group. But the chatter turns to her mortality. A year on, I’m still not as deft as I would like. She continues. Thanks us. Asks about T.H.E.S’ other volunteers.

She remembers.

“They can’t come. They’re busy today,” I say, more than once. Suddenly she’s concerned that her chores haven’t been too tough on us lot of volunteers. They haven’t.

She shows me a photo of a Valentine’s Day celebration we had held for them earlier in the year. They love our outings and celebrations. I’m not the most active of committee members, but I’m glad to have had several chances to think Today was great, and I helped this happen. The greatest sense of satisfaction, though, belongs to Yi An and Wynne, whose initiative gets things moving every time.

Mdm Ho offers us packet drinks from her fridge. One compartment up, in the freezer, is the potong ice-cream she keeps for her occasional cravings. Her other indulgence is smoking – I’ve only ever seen her at it once, it’s bad for her and she knows it, and she calls it tau jiak (literally “eating secretly”).

I know more about our elderly than on the day I started volunteering with T.H.E. Seniors a year ago. Besides looking to put my clumsy dialect to more frequent use, I was interested in their stories. I envisioned them to be wizened veterans, old hands at life. What kind of hard-won lessons could I get them to share? This young ‘un was truly curious.

Today my dialect is, regrettably, nowhere near proficient. And while these guys talk frequently about the past, they live in the present tense, with present-day problems, in one-room flats where bedbugs can hide in cracks in the paint and accost them in their sleep.

Sealing cracks in the paint at Mr Tan's.
Original post here.

I learnt that they can have a second-floor apartment but need help buying lunch from the coffeeshop one storey down (Mdm Ho).

I learnt that sight can be such a problem we have to read letters out (Mdm Tan).

And others just plain need help cleaning up (shall keep his/her identity secret for now).

As a student, as a fresh graduate, as an employee, it’s inevitable our priorities change. Many times we find a Saturday morning (or Friday night) can be spent more efficiently or comfortably - my own attendance is far from stellar, and more than a few times I’ve had to drag myself from bed. But if you find yourself wishing for a more meaningful way to spend 3 hours of your Saturday, you know where to head to.

For here is a place where you can make a difference, dialect pro or no, domestic god(dess) or no.

One of our fellow voices!
See other Voices of CSC.

Pheng Heong
I was visiting with: Ying Cong, Sheng Xian, Chun Hai

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